Breast cancer is the most common malignant tumor in women, and once it metastasizes, it still has a relatively high mortality rate. Compared to normal cells, cancer cells consume a large amount of nutrients to support their rapid growth and dissemination. Due to restricted angiogenesis, nutrients and oxygen are lost in large quantities in the microenvironment around the tumor, leading to metabolic stress within the tumor (regional metabolic imbalance). We are interested in understanding how cancer cells cope with metabolic stress to survive and even metastasize.

With the modernization of diets and lifestyle changes, the global obese population has nearly doubled in the past half-century. Obesity, in addition to its known association with cardiovascular diseases and metabolic problems such as diabetes, also promotes cancer occurrence and resistance to treatment by altering the tumor microenvironment through the adipokines secreted by excessive fat cells (systemic metabolic imbalance). However, cancer cells adapt to the stress caused by metabolic imbalance through different mechanisms, continuing to grow and metastasize. Therefore, if the molecular mechanisms underlying these processes can be delineated, it may serve as a prognostic indicator or therapeutic target for breast cancer.